Autumn's big sounds

Since Joni Mitchell is the archetypal female singer-songwriter and a restless musical adventurer, her influence knows no bounds. You might not hear the author of "You Turn Me On I'm a Radio" on the radio all that much, but her impact on everyone from Sarah McLachlan to Feist to Led Zeppelin (which is said to have written "Goin' to California" about her), has been enormous.

That much is apparent of late, starting with A Tribute to Joni Mitchell, which came out in the spring and was highlighted by Prince's shimmering "A Case of You."

Two other projects with Mitchell's name on them arrive today. Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters, is a jazz tribute featuring vocal performances from Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae, and Mitchell herself.

And Shine (Hear Music **½) is the new Joni Mitchell album fans weren't sure they would ever get. It's her first CD since 2002's Travelogue, an album she said would be her last. In interviews at the time, she called the music industry "a cesspool" that only cared about "golf and rappers" and said she had "come to hate music."

Thankfully, the 63-year-old Canadian has gotten over her distaste, and is again aiming to write songs with unconventional structures and gently entrancing melodies. On Shine's brightest moments - such as the wistful instrumental "One Week Last Summer" and "Night of the Iguana," which condenses Tennessee Williams' stage play - Mitchell shows she still has the knack.

The trouble with Shine - which follows Paul McCartney to the coffee-rich coffers of Starbucks' Hear Music label - is that the words get in the way of the music. The album is meant to be a thematically unified statement on everything wrong with the world, starting with "war, that's what history is for." On the title cut, "rising oceans and evaporating seas" and "Frankenstein technologies," not to mention "worldwide traffic jams," are added to a laundry list of reasons not to be cheerful.

It's an embittered, surprisingly nonpoetic approach. Though the complaining tone can't entirely weigh down the electric spirit of "Hana," or rob the fragile beauty from "If I Had a Heart" - even when a misanthropic Mitchell blames the planet's ills on "too many people, too little land" - sometimes it seems as if it's designed to.

River (Verve ***1/2) makes for a more nourishing listen, in part because Mitchell's old songs are better than her new ones. Jones sings "Court and Spark," Tina Turner stretches out with an assured "Edith and the Kingpin," and Corinne Bailey Rae turns in an able version of the title track, though that wintry soundscape has become a too-familiar staple on Christmas albums.

Hancock has been friendly with Mitchell since they worked together on her 1979 album Mingus, and the pianist treats her compositions with delicacy and sensitivity, with a band that includes Wayne Shorter on saxophone and Dave Holland on bass.

Shorter's "Nefertiti" and Duke Ellington's "Solitude" expand on an otherwise all-Mitchell program, and Leonard Cohen drops in for a closing spoken-word version of "The Jungle Line" to take the project out on a note of sepulchral weirdness.

nolead begins Steve Earle
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"One of these days, I'm going to lay this hammer down," Steve Earle claims on the workingman's protest song "Steve's Hammer (For Pete)." That'll be the day.

Washington Square Serenade is the 52-year-old Texan's 12th studio album, and the first after a three-year layoff that found the roots-rock wordsmith hunkering down on a novel, and starring as an ex-junkie on HBO's The Wire. Recording in his new home of New York, with the aid of John King (of the hip-hop producing duo the Dust Brothers), Earle uses Gotham and his wife Allison Moorer as his twin muses. The gruff troubadour mixes folk instrumentation with driving rhythms and dirty beats, and mixes beguiling love songs such as "Sparkle and Shine" and "Days Aren't Long Enough" (with Moorer on backups) with wild-eyed numbers like the apocalyptic "Red Is the Color" and the thumping "Oxycontin Blues." One of his best.

- D.D.
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nolead ends The Black Eyed Pea who isn't the glamorous girl, the guy with the faux hawk, or the creepy rapper with the long hair has made a name for himself as a producer and guest MC since his first beat-ific solo album, 2001's Lost Change. He's written, rapped and twiddled knobs for Mariah, Michael, Justin, and his fellow Pea Fergie. But this solo Songs is glossier, quirkier and fuller than its predecessors - will.i.am is as full of himself as any boastful rapper, but shows the pop-hook sensibility (on the delicately pretty "She's a Star") and the odd production twitches (on the hard electro-thumping "Get Your Money") he has long hid under his formidable hats.

This is loosely a concept album about falling in and out of love. But that plays second fiddle to will's twittering voice on the Caribbean-inflected "One More Chance," the clubby bump-and-grind of "The Donque Song" (with Snoop Dogg at his leering best), and the soulful socio-conscious "S.O.S. (Mother Nature)." With this kind of sonic diversity, will.i.am is reminiscent of another rapper/producer/band member: the Fugees' Wyclef Jean, only less annoying.

- A.D. Amorosi

nolead begins Foo Fighters
nolead ends nolead begins Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
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For longtime fans who worried that last year's stripped-down live set Skin and Bones meant Dave Grohl's grunge-pop outfit was going soft, the opening blast of Echoes, Silence should come as a relief. "The Pretender" starts out quiet but quickly builds to the spiky, melodic noise the band perfected with 1997's The Color and the Shape.

Reuniting with Color producer Gil Norton, the Foos deliver the requisite radio-ready rockers, but the album has its share of curveballs. Strangest among them is "Ballad of the Beaconsville Miners," an acoustic guitar duet between Grohl and Kaki King that feels more like a guitar-lesson exercise than a full-fledged instrumental.

Turning down the volume also exposes sentiments that might have been best left hidden behind a wall of noise. "We're just ordinary people, you and me," Grohl sings on "Statues," a vague musing on mortality that's more concerned with sounding thoughtful than being so. Echoes, Silence tries to abide by the Foos' formula while trying on a half-dozen new hats, but ultimately the remake is only skin deep.

- Sam Adams